Dell Wyse 5070
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Has anyone used a Dell Wyse 5070 for pfSense?
It's an extended thin client ideal spec for me but i heard some thin client devices are somehow locked. -
@daninmanchester
The Extended model has a PCIE slot that would nicely take a 4-port card. But I haven't seen one for less than like $175.
Here's a Reddit thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/dnncif/dell_wyse_5070_extended/ -
thanks @provels I saw that comment but it didn't read as though they had actually done it and I found another thread where someone had struggling loading an image.
The best I found in the UK was the equivalent of about $230 USD. But for the form factor, performance and power I didn't think I would get much better value. By the time I'd bought a CPU, motherboard, memory and case I'd be well over this and probably consuming a lot more power too. This thing idles under 10w. I already have a quad port card.
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the seller said "We would only recommend the Dell OS on these. It does look like it is possible to add your own OS on them but we wouldn't know how unfortunately." so I'm in two minds ....
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@daninmanchester said in Dell Wyse 5070:
the seller said "We would only recommend the Dell OS on these. It does look like it is possible to add your own OS on them but we wouldn't know how unfortunately." so I'm in two minds ....
Running pfSense 2.5.0 on Dell Wyse 5070 Extended with no problems so far.
NIC: 4 port HP NC364T -
@emikaadeo said in Dell Wyse 5070:
Running pfSense 2.5.0 on Dell Wyse 5070 Extended with no problems so far.
NIC: 4 port HP NC364TJust purchased a Dell Wyze 5070 Extended off ebay.
It came with 4 GB Ram, 16GB eMMC SSD. I'll be running PIA VPN on the box, I have 500GB up/down to the house.
Will 4 GB Ram, 16GB eMMC SSD suffice, or should I bump it up to 8 GB Ram and a larger m.2 SSD ?
SJ
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@sjtsnix you can probably get away with 4Gb. i have 8Gb but for SOHO use (including PIA) I barely touch the available resources. I'm using an HP 730 but they are pretty similar.
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Yeah 4G will be fine for almost everything. 1G would probably be fine. You only need a lot of RAM if you're running RAM hungry packages like Snort/Suricata/pfBlocker(with a lot of lists) or if you have a very large number of states. But that hardware is unlikely to ever see >2M states!
If the eMMC is non-replaceable consider enabling RAM disks to reduce drive writes to it.
Steve
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@sjtsnix said in Dell Wyse 5070:
Just purchased a Dell Wyze 5070 Extended off ebay.
It came with 4 GB Ram, 16GB eMMC SSD. I'll be running PIA VPN on the box, I have 500GB up/down to the house.
Will 4 GB Ram, 16GB eMMC SSD suffice, or should I bump it up to 8 GB Ram and a larger m.2 SSD ?
SJ
Mine has 8 GB RAM and 128 GB M.2 SSD.
I'm using pfBlockerNG with a huge OISD list.
Max. RAM usage is at 15-17% -
@stephenw10 said in Dell Wyse 5070:
If the eMMC is non-replaceable consider enabling RAM disks to reduce drive writes to it.
Hello Stephen,
thanks for the reply, I may toss a small m.2 in it for that reason and/or add a 2nd stick of ddr4 to bring it up to 8 gb, and that'll give me real estate for the ram disk.So far quite pleased with this Dell Wyse 5070 extended as my pfSense device.
SJ
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@emikaadeo said in Dell Wyse 5070:
Mine has 8 GB RAM and 128 GB M.2 SSD.
I'm using pfBlockerNG with a huge OISD list.
Max. RAM usage is at 15-17%Thanks for the info.... looks like I'm good for now, and will bump up RAM to 8gb and add a small m.2 ssd as well, as I am looking to use pfBlockerNG as well. This is my first pfSense box, so wanted to make sure It's got the hardware resources it needs.
SJ
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@daninmanchester said in Dell Wyse 5070:
you can probably get away with 4Gb. i have 8Gb but for SOHO use (including PIA) I barely touch the available resources. I'm using an HP 730 but they are pretty similar.
I was 'this close' to going with the HP 730, then I stumbled upon info on the Dell Wyse 5070 and thought with it being a 'newer' system running ddr4 as opposed to ddr3 in the hp 730, that it might be more energy efficient, the CPU passmark was similar between the dell and the HP.
SJ
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@sjtsnix said in Dell Wyse 5070:
@daninmanchester said in Dell Wyse 5070:
you can probably get away with 4Gb. i have 8Gb but for SOHO use (including PIA) I barely touch the available resources. I'm using an HP 730 but they are pretty similar.
I was 'this close' to going with the HP 730, then I stumbled upon info on the Dell Wyse 5070 and thought with it being a 'newer' system running ddr4 as opposed to ddr3 in the hp 730, that it might be more energy efficient, the CPU passmark was similar between the dell and the HP.
SJ
Just checking back in to see how this build went/going. I’m redoing our network and a little torn on what hardware I want to use. Curious how the 4GB worked out for you and if you are running Suricata/Snort.
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@sledge said in Dell Wyse 5070:
Just checking back in to see how this build went/going. I’m redoing our network and a little torn on what hardware I want to use. Curious how the 4GB worked out for you and if you are running Suricata/Snort.
@sledge said in Dell Wyse 5070:
Just checking back in to see how this build went/going. I’m redoing our network and a little torn on what hardware I want to use. Curious how the 4GB worked out for you and if you are running Suricata/Snort.
Hello Sledge,
I had pfBlockerNG-devel running and and performance appeared to be fine for my needs.
At present I'm back to a default install with two LANS, and all traffic in/out of my network is currently via a VPN connection via PIA.
I pay for 500 Mbps up and down. Speedtest is showing 168 Mbps up and 130 Mbps down this evening. I've seen it around 250 Mbps up and down behind the VPN like this. This is comparable hit I took running VPN on an ASUS router that I replaced with the PFSense on the Dell Wyse 5070. Not sure if this is an acceptable overhead loss on the VPN or not and/or if there is a way to improve upon.
I plan on installing Suricata/Snort when I have time in the future.
SJ
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@usofa1984 said in Dell Wyse 5070:
Hello Sledge,
I had pfBlockerNG-devel running and and performance appeared to be fine for my needs.
At present I'm back to a default install with two LANS, and all traffic in/out of my network is currently via a VPN connection via PIA.
I pay for 500 Mbps up and down. Speedtest is showing 168 Mbps up and 130 Mbps down this evening. I've seen it around 250 Mbps up and down behind the VPN like this. This is comparable hit I took running VPN on an ASUS router that I replaced with the PFSense on the Dell Wyse 5070. Not sure if this is an acceptable overhead loss on the VPN or not and/or if there is a way to improve upon.
I plan on installing Suricata/Snort when I have time in the future.
SJ
Thanks for the quick response back. I have 1gb fiber up/down and looking to maximize my available speed (as much as reasonable). Without going too in-depth, on my own setup I plan on running a few VLAN's with DPI/IPS enabled and potentially VPN as needed. I'm still getting my feet wet so reading & researching lots. My general understanding is throughput suffers when using firewall apps/rules and really suffers when using VPN. Below is a screen cap of the Netgate 6100 I was considering. Left side is iPerf3 traffic and right side is IMIX traffic.
Tying this back to the Wyse 5070, I am not sure the exact processor you have in yours. Looking at the Dell site this morning I see they offer a version with the Intel Pentium Silver J5005.
It looks like the J5005 gets a 3,073 passmark score. In comparison, the Netgate 6100 uses an Intel Atom C3558, which squeezes out a 2,405 passmark score.
What I don't understand is why the 6100 can report 552 Mbps VPN throughput on IMIX traffic and it has a lower passmark score, yet the Wyse with a higher score is only getting about half that value. Is the QAT and AES-GCM-128 really making up that much of the difference? I'm sure there are other variables at play here so we may not be getting an apples-to-apples comparison. I do get VPN is slower as I already pointed out, but according to the passmark scores the Wyse hardware should be able to keep up (actually do better) so it has me thinking the 6100 has some software coding or something to help boost it.
Either way, it doesn't look like the Wyse would likely allow me to hit 1 Gbps VPN connections.
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@sledge said in Dell Wyse 5070:
Is the QAT and AES-GCM-128 really making up that much of the difference?
It absolutely could be. What VPN settings are you using?
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@sledge said in Dell Wyse 5070:
What I don't understand is why the 6100 can report 552 Mbps VPN throughput on IMIX traffic and it has a lower passmark score, yet the Wyse with a higher score is only getting about half that value.
I'm guessing that the other user was talking about speeds in OpenVPN tunnel or he has an Intel Celeron version maybe.
Mine has Intel Pentium Silver J5005, I'm paying for 600 Mbps down / 120 up. With WireGuard tunnel to Mullvad VPN I can easily achieve over 500 Mbps down and over 100 Mbps up (and that's with CoDel limiters for bufferbloat enabled) -
@stephenw10 said in Dell Wyse 5070:
@sledge said in Dell Wyse 5070:
Is the QAT and AES-GCM-128 really making up that much of the difference?
It absolutely could be. What VPN settings are you using?
The Wyse is @USofA1984's machine, not mine, so I will defer to him on VPN settings.
I was just making the observation as I am trying to decide on what device I want to use for my firewall/router and the Wyse was an interesting option to me.
Out of curiosity is QAT something built into select processors, or can it be added with a PCI card? If built-in, how do I go about finding which processors have it? And if a card, are certain ones supported by pfSense? Lastly, I am not yet aware all the differences between pfSense and pfSense+ but could see these being a + feature. Is that true?
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Ah, yes they're connected to PIA so almost certainly OpenVPN. Much slower than IPSec with QAT acceleration.
QAT is on-die in some CPUs like the Atom C3000 but can also be a separate device on a card. There are several QAT devices with varying capabilities.
Steve
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@emikaadeo said in Dell Wyse 5070:
I'm guessing that the other user was talking about speeds in OpenVPN tunnel or he has an Intel Celeron version maybe.
Mine has Intel Pentium Silver J5005, I'm paying for 600 Mbps down / 120 up. With WireGuard tunnel to Mullvad VPN I can easily achieve over 500 Mbps down and over 100 Mbps up (and that's with CoDel limiters for bufferbloat enabled)Sorry for the delay, to answer the question, yes, I'm using OpenVPN for my VPN tunnel, and the Dell Wyse 5070 does have the Intel Pentium Silver J5005, with a single 4GB DDR4 Stick of Ram and using the onboard 16GB eMMC drive.
SJ
